Ode to the Half-Broken

Two unexpected revelations follow:

1. I am lying in an old, rusted bathtub covered in a pile of electromagnets.

2. My left leg is missing.

The electromagnets explain the lack of response from my peripheral systems, as well as the loss of public signals. So, probably, the outside world still exists.

My physical configuration is bipedal and humanoid, if taller and bulkier than the upper range of human form, and intentionally more imposing. My maker aggressively rejected the comfort-inducing soft-shell mimicry that was the height of fashion in the industry at the time I was made, and there is no chance anyone would mistake me for meatlife. However, the base architectural similarity means that, just as it would be for a human, the loss of one leg objectively represents calamitous impairment. I regard with a mix of anger, bemusement, and frustration the neatly clipped wires and cleanly severed joints protruding from my now-vacant leg socket. My attackers certainly could have done vastly more damage than they did, but I am not inclined to be charitable toward them for that small favor.

The electromagnets would have kept nearly any mech offline indefinitely—permanently, if no rescue ever came to dig them out—but I had been built in different times, by a paranoid creator, and in anticipation of both giving and receiving trouble. Those extra protocols and protections were how I had been able to come back online on my own, though not soon enough to prevent my assailants from departing with my leg, anonymity intact.

I unload the motor-unlock protocols from spare memory, dump several months of research into manipulating ant chemical trails that I’m not sure I have backed up elsewhere, and, with the newly freed-up runspace, reinitialize some of my old combat programming. My right arm reboots in sequence, each segment from the shoulder down switching into battle mode as it comes back online, rotating out and expanding armored plates that provide additional EM shielding.

At last, I can curl and flex my three primary fingers and the symmetrical pair of thumbs to either side of my palm. I pick up the electromagnets one by one and throw them with the force of my current mood, and find it satisfying how they crash through the crumbling, pale yellow cinder blocks of the far wall into whatever dead space lay beyond.

When enough have been removed, I am able to bring up and armor my other arm, and make short work of the rest. It is an efficient process, but as soon as I safely can, I back down the plating to my normal outer shell. Then I also bring up the rest of my mindsystem and peripherals.

I am fully myself again. I am still, however, stuck in the bathtub and missing a leg.

There is nothing in the room around me to provide any more context for what happened to me, or that could be used as a means of extricating myself; the adjacent wall has the cracked remains of a sink and, above it, a frame, hanging crooked. Tiny shards of mirror still cling to it. A few lumps on the floor might have once been towels, might be some other detritus from the collapse of civilization. The ceiling plaster is water-damaged, crumbling enough to reveal beams, and otherwise utterly generic in look and material. It is an old, abandoned bathroom, nothing more.

I have never been inside a bathtub before, and wonder about the previous tenants of this place, prior to the war, and how strange and unpleasant it must be to have an organic body, soft and fallible and requiring washing away of whatever dirt and contaminants might cling to it. I catch myself before I can take that thought further; this condescension toward humanity was my maker’s, never my own. My mind is free now, and this will not do.

I sit up and lean over one side of the tub, extending the length of my arm until it reaches the wall beside me, and push; the idea is to tip the tub over in the other direction, dumping me out, but my own weight and the weight of the tub are greater than the stability of the wall, and my hand goes through mushy plaster.

I find a stud and push again, only to hear the groan of the tub’s feet sinking through several layers of floor. Examination shows the boards below me are rotting, and this raises new and significant concerns about the possibility that everything might collapse if I am not more cautious in proceeding. I can survive many events, especially with my full body armor activated, but I have no idea how many floors I am up, nor how many floors above me might in turn collapse. Being buried in tens of meters of rubble would not be an improvement of my situation.

I remove my hand from the wall and consider.